


Still the Screams Echo

by deliriumbubbles



Category: The Venture Bros
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 02:41:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16484507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliriumbubbles/pseuds/deliriumbubbles
Summary: For Haunted Prompts: An echoing scream. Rusty hears the boys screaming and goes to look for them.





	Still the Screams Echo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [danvssomethingorother](https://archiveofourown.org/users/danvssomethingorother/gifts).



The boys were screaming.

 

Not in with wails of shock or surprise. Screaming. Full-throated, terrified shrieks.

 

They were screaming so hard and so loud that Rusty couldn’t distinguish one voice from the other. One long, heart-rending scream after another. They multiplied, echoing all around him, off the walls of the cave, through its fathomless depths.

 

“Where are you?” Rusty shouted in return, scrambling over slippery rocks made more slippery with his blood as he scraped his skin against them.

 

He could barely hear his own voice. They drowned him out almost entirely. The vibrations prickled the hair on his skin, vibrated his bones, seeped into his brain. Their terror quivered, nearly palpable in the air. Like he could touch it. Like maybe he could follow the threads of their cries into whatever dark den might hold their little souls.

 

“Boys! If you don’t come out right now, your bodyguard and I are going to be very annoyed!”

 

He shuddered, looking around for said bodyguard. Where _was_ that man? Why wasn’t he _here_? He was always here. Or maybe he’d gone ahead to find them.

 

Rusty stumbled again and hit the ground hard. Those incessant, damnable screams. He pressed his hands to his ears.

 

“Stop! Stop! Please!”

 

As their screams turned to wails, Rusty opened his eyes again.

 

_NO._

 

Ragged and bloodied, Rusty bolted through the house, cursing the length of the hallways. The lab had always been too far from the nursery. He’d always thought so.

 

That was when their cries stopped.

 

Rusty fell to his knees, each tiny body twisted and bloodied beside him. In their own room. In his own home, as he’d been so close to them and yet not close enough. He pulled Hank to his chest first, then Dean, and they were so small. Too small.

 

A kiss to each little head. To little, limp fingers. Rocking them, the way he once had when they were fresh and new.

 

“C’mon! Knock it off!”

 

The thundering baritone drew Rusty, struggling out of his dreams. He clung to the ruined bodies for as long as he could before opening his eyes and seeing a deep scowl fixed on him above a pair of ruthlessly blue eyes.

 

“You were havin’ a nightmare. Don’t squeeze me so hard,” Brock grumbled.

 

“I wasn’t having a nightmare,” Rusty argued crabbily. “I don’t even remember what it was about.”

 

“Boys were up to something, I guess. Hank put another giraffe in here?”

 

Impossibly strong arms wrapped around his narrow shoulders. Rusty rested his head against the bare chest.

 

“Something like that.”

 

It was quiet here, in his bedroom. The spacious, lonesome monument to his dead brother, completely with his booming voice every morning and every inch of the Venture blue he’d bedecked his apartment with. A penthouse housed in the clouds, miles from the graves, the stains in the carpet, the memories.

 

Still.

 

The screams echoed.


End file.
